julian@riacs.UUCP (06/11/87)
The Programmer's Online Companion
Steve Capps (yes, that Steve Capps)
Addison-Wesley
$29 at ComputerWare
Programmer's Online Companion provides an online lookup facility for
the Mac Toolbox. It's brought up with a keystroke, and lets you look up
things by key strings, e.g. "scrollr" will find "ScrollRect." It then
helps you type in your program text (more below). By default, the key
strings will match only procedure or data structure names, but
Companion can also be told to match on any word in the descriptions.
The help window is big enough to hold the entry being displayed and is
always located at the bottom of the screen. As you pop through the
database the window adjusts itself for each entry. Besides displaying
the definition of the routine or data structure, various symbols are
displayed for additional information, such as a potential heap change
if the routine is called. IM page numbers for volumes I-IV are included.
A nice feature: when you hit command-ENTER the selected word in the
Companion window is inserted into the current edit window.
Command-SHIFT-ENTER transfers the entire contents of the Companion
window, with things like VAR and type declarations stripped out so you
can use the new text directly, without having to delete the extra text
yourself.
The only problem I've found so far is that the default keystroke to
call up Companion is command-accentgrave. This is exactly the key that
MacTerminal and MicroPhone use for the ESCAPE key, which is of course
mandatory for editing on a host. All you have to do is change
Companion's popup key to something else with the installer program. The
documentation doesn't mention it, but when you hit the Install button,
it installs with its own default values, so you have to remember to do
the key changes immediately afterwards.
POC comes with a text version of its database, so you can edit it to
your liking. The installer will then reprocess the new file to create
its internal database.
I've also used MacReference from Dr. Tom and MacMan. The former is
nice but requires MS File for the online part, besides being sadly
out of date. The index card deck is real useful to have on the desk
next to the Mac, since index cards don't crash. MacMan is slow and
has many bugs, both in the code and its database. Companion is by far
the best of the three I've seen, and is just what I want by my side
while programming.
--
"Have you ever wondered if taxation without representation was cheaper?"
Julian "a tribble took it" Gomez
julian@riacs.edu || {...decvax!}ames!riacs!juliandtw@f.gp.cs.cmu.edu.UUCP (06/11/87)
> MacMan is slow and has many bugs, both in the code and its database.
MacMan II by Walter Smith (proofread by Bruce Horn) is not slow and the
database (at least the one he gave me) is editable.blh@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu.UUCP (06/12/87)
Although it says that I proofread Walter Smith's Manual database, I think I have the only proofread version (and it's lost somewhere!). I can't take credit for something that isn't available! Even the non-proofread version is quite usable; the errors are minor typos, poor formatting, and capitalization problems (nearly all of the function names are capitalized correctly in the database text, however). I would like to try the Programmer's Online Companion. Knowing Steve Capps, I'm sure it's great. -- Bruce Horn, Carnegie Mellon CSD uucp: ...!seismo!cmucspt!cmu-cs-vlsi!blh ARPA: blh@vlsi.cs.cmu.edu